Marlene Amstad – News – SRF

The President of the Financial Markets Authority admits that limits have been reached – new instruments are intended to change that.

Her job is to supervise the Swiss financial market – and therefore also the big banks: Marlene Amstad, President of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma). After the demise of CS, the authority came under criticism: Why couldn’t it prevent the big bank from going under?

Marlene Amstad

President of the Swiss Financial Markets Supervisory Authority (Finma)


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Marlene Amstad (55) is the top supervisor of the Swiss financial center: as President of the Finma Board of Directors, since 2021. The economist, with a doctorate in econometrics, began her career at the Economic Institute of ETH Zurich. She then took a job in the research department at the Swiss National Bank. In this role, she works with the US Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements in Hong Kong, where she advises Asian central banks. Marlene Amstad teaches at universities in Switzerland and abroad and is, among other things, an honorary professor at the University of Bern. As Finma President, Marlene Amstad advocates for more instruments to monitor Swiss banks – and this repeatedly encounters resistance. On September 6, 2024, Amstad was elected by the Federal Council as Finma President for another four years.

SRF News: Finma says it did everything it could to prevent the CS debacle. But are you not self-critical enough? A viewer writes to us that the authority is partly to blame for the downfall of Credit Suisse.

Marlene Amstad: It was a very dramatic event and I understand that it is being viewed critically. With the CS we really did reach the limits of our capabilities. With new instruments we hope that we can intervene earlier in the future and also ensure that the likelihood of a weekend like the one we experienced in March 2023 decreases.

As for self-criticism: At the end of last year, when we presented our lessons from the CS situation, we already identified various measures to make it clear that we too are making even greater use of discretion.

You had already secretly prepared the restructuring of Credit Suisse in the summer of 2022. Shouldn’t you have initiated the restructuring the following autumn?

Restructuring is very drastic. Credit Suisse is not part of the financial market supervisory authority. Such drastic cuts are clearly regulated by law. CS could therefore not simply be restructured when the share price is low.

What was also somewhat overlooked was that we had already “practiced” the restructuring in November 2022 – using real-time data from Credit Suisse. We did this together with other foreign regulators, especially in the USA and Great Britain.

As we know, things turned out differently.

We had various options on the table that weekend in March 2023 and, together with the other authorities, we chose the option with the lowest risks that tackled the root of the problem, namely addressing CS’s trust problem.

What does Finma do?


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The Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (Finma) has been monitoring the Swiss financial centre since 2009 – it ultimately protects creditors, insured persons and investors. Anyone who operates a bank or insurance company in Switzerland or offers funds or other financial products receives a licence from Finma and is monitored by it.

Finma emerged from three predecessor authorities: the Federal Banking Commission, the Federal Office of Private Insurance and the Anti-Money Laundering Control Authority.

Finma supervises 30,000 financial products, such as investment funds and companies – including 500 banks.

Finma supervises 30,000 financial products, such as investment funds and companies – including 500 banks. Last year, its budget was 156 million francs.

Around 560 full-time employees worked for Finma in 2023.

Finma only employs 560 people. Luxembourg has twice as many. Are you too weak to be effective?

No. We are like the police in the system. There isn’t a policeman sitting next to every driver. In addition, we use auditing companies as an extension of our system, a peculiarity of the Swiss financial market.

Do you now need more staff to supervise UBS? At the height of the crisis, only six people were said to be responsible for CS.

That was just the core team. There were many more people responsible for the bank. Now we have merged teams and around 60 people are overseeing UBS. We grow when we have to take on new tasks. UBS is a concentration of risk in the financial center and that is one of the reasons why we will grow appropriately.

The interview was conducted by Reto Lipp.

Eco Talk, June 17, 2024, 10:25 p.m. ;

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